A Romanian woman has given birth to a son and is due to give birth to his twin six weeks later in what has been called a medical first in Romania.

The twins were conceived from the same egg in May, but had separate placentas. The mother, Maricica Tescu has two uteruses due to a congenital malformation. Her first child was born on December 11, the second twin is due to be born at full term at the end of January.

From now until 10:00 PM EST (GMT-5) on Monday, January 10, 2005, anyone can nominate their favorite weblogs for the 2005 Bloggies.The Bloggies are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs.Everyone's invited to take part in the awarding process, so find out how you can nominate and vote for your favorite blogs!

I came across this page by Ken Seehof, who claims to have a 12 billion words palindrome. A palindrome is a word, or in this case a sentence, that is exactly the same when read backbards as forwards.On his site he publishes a much shorter version, which still is very long. The sentence appears to be highly repetetive, but it is non-repeating in the mathematical sense. I must admit though that the sentence doesn't make very much sense...

However, when you shorten his sentence even further, you get a palindrome that does appeal to me:A man, a plan, a cat, a dog, God at a canal -- Panama!

TNO (the Dutch applied physics research institute) has created what they call a 2.5 gigapixel zoomable picture of Delft (where I live) and The Hague in the background (where I work). It's a panorama photo created from 600 regular digital pictures that they took from the tallest building in Delft: the faculty of Electrical Engineering (where I got my MSc) of the Delft University of Technology.

They created an automated setup that took the pictures in 1 hour and 20 minutes. It then took 20 hours to fit them together, and 3 days on 5 high-end computers to create the composite.

I think it's a really cool picture, especially because it's all known territory to me.

(If the zoomable image on above link is not loading, use this mirror.)